Maine Meets Worldhttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com
Exploring connections between state and global issuesThu, 27 Jul 2017 12:45:40 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.3103403399Politicians need to care more about the country and less about themselveshttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/07/27/home/politicians-need-to-care-more-about-the-country-and-less-about-themselves/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/07/27/home/politicians-need-to-care-more-about-the-country-and-less-about-themselves/#respondThu, 27 Jul 2017 12:45:40 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=702Earlier this week, Lance Duston wrote on his BDN blog about the need for better-qualified public officials. He argued that voters need to get rid of their fixation on candidates’ regular-guy appeal and instead support those who have government experience and relevant education.

I agree with Lance on his first point, but I think he misses the mark on his second. An elected official should have advisers and staffers with loads of government experience and education, and they should stock their administrations with highly qualified individuals. However, the elected officials themselves do not necessarily need those qualifications. There are good reasons to not exclusively elect people who have made their careers in public policy. Our representatives serve as an interface between the people and the government, and for the government to be responsive to the needs of different communities, we need people in office with a diversity of backgrounds. A public policy education or experience in government should not be disparaged by voters, but it also should not be a prerequisite to hold office.

Nevertheless, we should not be looking to elect candidates who seem like “normal” people, and we certainly should not expect them to act like normal people once in office. What we need are public servants. We need individuals who have unambiguous motivations for running for office and who will set aside their own self-interests once elected. Our best politicians demonstrate such integrity regardless of their pedigree and regardless of how much you might want to get a beer with them. Our worst lack it entirely despite their prestigious degree or common-man credentials. Holding elected office is unique in how crucial this is compared to other lines of work, and not everyone can or should do it.

There are two main types of problems that arise from having elected officials who let regular self-interest trump their duty to the communities they serve. The first is the prioritization of one’s personal finances over the best interests of one’s constituents, i.e. financial corruption. The most egregious example of this is plain-old vote-buying, and other more modern crimes such as insider trading are nearly as bad. However, there are more common and perfectly legal ways public officials—both elected and appointed—betray the public interest for their own finances. When officials cash in on their experience by going to work for an industry that benefited from their actions, it is hard to know whether they were acting in the public’s interest while in office or using their position to enrich their future selves. This is a good example of why we don’t want someone acting (or trying to act) like a normal person while holding office. Normal people like money and will do what they can to get more of it. But normal people don’t face the choice of turning down a lucrative job offer—sometimes in the millions for high-level federal officials—in order to preserve an abstract public faith in the integrity of their past decisions. That requires someone with a strong adherence to the value of public service.

The second category is the prioritization of one’s personal power over the best interests of one’s constituents. This is particularly slippery since we live in a representative democracy, so the power of an individual representative can be said to better serve their constituency. But there is no question that some behavior on the part of politicians serves only their self-aggrandizement, and rarely does that lead to better outcomes for their constituents. The state of partisan politics in general speaks to how prevalent this issue is, but we also have two good examples from the past month. First, there was the state government shutdown, which accomplished little for the people of Maine but a lot for those who enjoy doing things that make them feel powerful. What better way to remind yourself how important you are than to shut down an entire government for no major gain, even if only for a couple days? Second, at the national level, the effort to pass healthcare legislation has been tightly controlled by Republican leadership to the detriment of not only every Democrat but also many Republicans, particularly in the Senate, where the bill was drafted in secret then rushed to a vote. While we see an endless stream of headlines about the dramatic deaths and resurrections of the effort, we have little idea what is even being voted on. It seems many members of Congress don’t either. If elected officials were trying to pursue a fair legislative process that best served the interests of the public, this is not what they would be doing. If, however, they were trying to check a box on a campaign promise and embarrass their rivals (in both parties) so that they are better positioned to run for reelection and keep their leadership spot, then they might be on track.

Much of the trading of public best interest for power happens around campaigning. It happens in the pursuit of special interest support as well as in legislative power jockeying. It takes a lot of money to run for office, and most of that money does not come from constituents but from parties, PACs, and wealthy businesses and individuals. The lines are fuzzy—do donors give money to representatives because they hope they will vote for their issues, or do representatives vote for donors’ issues because they give them money?—but our politicians have to see them clearly. Our campaign finance laws are unlikely to improve anytime soon, so as voters, there are important questions we need to ask ourselves about a candidate before voting for them. Do we trust that they would act against the interests of a campaign donor if it was the right thing to do? Do we trust that they would hold their ground on an issue even if a major donor threatened to drop their support for them? A similar standard should apply to actions that are not popular with voters but the elected official, trusting that he or she has better information, supports and argues for. That honesty is required for a democracy to function properly, but many people would not be able to uphold those values in practice. It’s hard to be threatened with the loss of one’s power—potentially one’s whole career—and stay the course.

Judging a candidate’s character is a key part of choosing who to vote for. Stances on policy issues are important of course, but an elected official has to do a lot more than vote yes or no on a handful of big-ticket items. For all that time negotiating with other lawmakers, advocating to government agencies, and making decisions on issues that don’t get much publicity, it will be their character setting their path, not their campaign platform. When evaluating the character of a candidate, voters should not focus solely on their government expertise or relatability. We should look for evidence that they will uphold the values of public service.

This is my last post on Maine Meets World for the foreseeable future. I’m very grateful to the Bangor Daily News for providing this platform to share my thoughts. My posts since the beginning of the new year have been off-theme, but for articles on how global issues have affected Maine’s paper industry, National Guard members, and other topics, please check out the archives.

]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/07/27/home/politicians-need-to-care-more-about-the-country-and-less-about-themselves/feed/0702The Republican healthcare plan would cause more American deaths than terrorismhttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/05/05/home/the-republican-healthcare-plan-would-cause-more-american-deaths-than-terrorism/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/05/05/home/the-republican-healthcare-plan-would-cause-more-american-deaths-than-terrorism/#commentsFri, 05 May 2017 15:45:09 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=681Of all the threats to American lives, few frighten the country more than terrorism. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of people elsewhere in the world have lost their lives to terrorism over the past two decades. ISIS has killed upwards of 50,000people over the course of their existence, one or two hundred of whom were American, and al Qaeda has killed over 4,000, most of whom were American. The fight against these groups has consumed much of the U.S. government since 9/11, and it continues to be a top worry of the American people.

But if it’s the loss of American life we’re afraid of, we may need to change our priorities. The Republican Party really put things in perspective for all of us on Thursday, when they passed the American Health Care Act through the House of Representatives. It is a remarkable plan to deny millions of Americans healthcare. The Congressional Budget Office said the original plan would cause 24 million Americans to lose their health insurance by 2026, and 14 million would lose it just in 2018. While the CBO hasn’t had time to score the mildly revised plan, there’s little in it that is likely to reverse those numbers.

As you might imagine, not having health insurance means not having good healthcare. It doesn’t just mean higher bills or even bankruptcy—it means people will not get treated for their problems. And that means people are more likely to die from illness and injury. As it turns out, there is research that confirms this. Studies from the National Institutes of Health, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine, for instance, all found that lack of health insurance significantly increased the likelihood of death. The level of mortality rate increase varied across the studies, but applying the most conservative of the estimates to the the number of people slated to lose health insurance under the AHCA tells us that roughly 24,000 more Americans will die each year. That calculation is based on 20 million people losing insurance, so we would be looking at about 17,000 additional deaths per year starting in 2018/19, once 14 million people lose insurance, and about 29,000 by 2026, when 24 million have lost it.

I must say, part of my job entails researching ways to beat violent extremism, and it feels a bit pointless in comparison. Trying to keep the Senate from passing the AHCA in its current form might be a more worthwhile endeavor if the goal is to save lives.

It’s hard to think of what bill the House could have passed that would kill more Americans than this. A declaration of war probably wouldn’t have done it. The AHCA will lead to more American deaths per year than any war since WWII. Even Vietnam, seen in retrospect as such a disastrous conflict, had a peak of 16,899 American deaths in one year. That’s akin to year one of the AHCA.

Why would Bruce Poliquin vote for this bill? Why would 216 of his colleagues vote for this bill? Why would anyone vote for this bill?

“John Lewis ought to look at history. It was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant who fought the Jim Crow laws. A simple thank you would suffice.” – Governor Paul LePage on WVOM Tuesday, January 17

“The blacks, the NAACP (paint) all white people with one brush. To say that every white American is a racist is an insult. The NAACP should apologize to the white people, to the people from the North for fighting their battle.” – LePage to the Portland Press Herald Tuesday, January 17

Governor LePage has made plenty of infamous remarks, and although they were always terrible, I admit I used to find them more comical than upsetting. When he called a state legislator a “socialist cocksucker” for instance, it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity. When he made the comment about almost all the people arrested for dealing drugs in Maine being non-white (in the country’s whitest state), it seemed that he was just letting slip a reality of the justice system in America that most other officials were smart enough to not say out loud. When it turned out what he said was not true, that most of those arrested were in fact white, that just doubly confirmed the reality of how racial minorities are perceived when it comes to crime. Sure, it was a terrible thing to say, but it was funny that a real governor really said it, and it seemed unlikely to make anything tangibly worse than it already was.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, but I find it much harder to laugh at the remarks LePage made on Tuesday. If his previous ham-handed comments could be chalked up to unfiltered buffoonery and were a confirmation of what we already knew he thought but hadn’t yet said, his words directed at John Lewis, the NAACP, and black people in general are, at least for me, much worse than I would have expected of him. They demonstrate a profoundly twisted understanding of not only historical events but what human rights mean more broadly.

To reiterate, LePage believes that black people should thank white people, particularly Northerners, for fighting for their rights and apologize for calling white people racist. That belief, quite simply, fundamentally violates a modern understanding of humanity, wherein individuals are endowed—by virtue of nothing other than their existence—rights equal to every other individual. We are fortunate in the United States to have this truth spelled out for us in our founding documents.

These rights—human rights—cannot be given and taken away; they are not currency. They can only be violated and restored. Black slaves possessed fundamental human rights just as much as any living person does today, but they were violently, continuously, and thoroughly broken by their white captors. Black people living under Jim Crow possessed these rights, but they were violated by their white rulers. At no point did Abraham Lincoln or any other white American give black people something that wasn’t already theirs. Slaves’ freedom wasn’t created by Lincoln; it had been systematically strangled by their captors since birth, and Lincoln helped restore it. Black Americans’ civil rights weren’t invented by JFK and Lyndon Johnson; they had been categorically denied based on skin color, and the legislation LBJ signed into law helped restore them. The many white Americans who fought in the Civil War and defeated Southern slavery and the few who participated in the Civil Rights Movement were not engaged in the addition of newfound justice to the world. They were undoing some of the grave injustices already done by their kind. They were helping to give black people what they were due. To ask black people to thank those white people for what they did is to think that those white people were innocent bystanders. It is to think that they could have just as easily chosen to stand by for further centuries of horrific crimes perpetrated against their fellow man and be consigned to history as merely adequate or even respectable in their inaction, not actively complicit in the horror.

The significance of complicity was not at all lost on those suffering the injustices. Martin Luther King, Jr. perhaps says it best in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” addressed to white clergymen who condemned his campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience:

… I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Let us also consider the actual history of white involvement in the advancement of the rights of black people, because it is not as favorable as LePage seems to believe. As nice as it may be to remember it this way, the Civil War was not a Northern holy war to rain justice down on Southern slavers. Slavery may have made Northerners uncomfortable, but before the war, they were only attempting to rein in its growth, not exterminate it from the country entirely. It was the South’s slave-based zealotry that led them to secede from the Union, preferring to split the nation than endure any hindrance to their barbaric treatment of Black people. It was the splitting of the Union that caused the North to go to war, and it was only in the throes of conflict that they proclaimed the freedom of slaves in rebel territory, and only at the end of the conflict did they end slavery in the whole nation.

One hundred years later, the Civil Rights Movement, in which John Lewis was a major figure, saw very little support from white people. We have an inaccurate perception nowadays of the Movement as a story of evil, racist Southerners as the sole villain with the rest of the country behind MLK and his compatriots. The reality is that most Americans did not support what the Movement was doing. Looking at survey data from the time makes this clear:

61% of people disapproved of the Freedom Riders riding buses into Southern states to challenge the segregation of transportation (1961)

50% of whites thought Martin Luther King was hurting the cause of civil rights, compared to 36% who thought he was helping (1966)

83% of people somewhat (30%) or definitely (53%) agreed with the statement “Negroes would be better off if they would take advantage of the opportunities that have been made available rather than spending so much time protesting.” (1967)

The list goes on. For comparison, 40% of white Americans today hold favorable views of Black Lives Matter, a movement treated as irreconcilably controversial. As for Northerners specifically, it seems they only tolerated the Civil Rights Movement as long as it wasn’t focused on them. This chart from Gallup showing national support for MLK by year demonstrates the point:

Support for him was roughly split between favorable and unfavorable until 1966, when people viewed him unfavorably by a 2-to-1 margin. That was the year he helped expand the Civil Rights Movement to tackle discrimination in the North. As soon as Dr. King’s eyes turned toward the country as a whole, he seemed a lot less appealing to those who had been rooting for, or at least tolerant of, his work in the South.

It is difficult to find a civil rights issue that white people were simply neutral on, let alone supportive of, in the 1960s. One exception that proves the rule is a question that asked whether respondents supported the actions of civil rights groups or the State of Alabama during the 1965 events in Selma, when law enforcement officers beat activists, including John Lewis, in the event that we now know as “Bloody Sunday.” 48% supported the civil rights groups. 21% supported the State of Alabama. The rest said either “not sure” or “neither.” Watching peaceful protesters fiercely beaten is what it took to get national support for civil rights groups almost—but not quite—to 50%. These civil rights demonstrations in Selma and throughout the South are now rightly considered seminal moments of American history, and we do not have white people to thank for them, Northern or Southern.

But to reiterate my earlier point, let’s imagine white people did all of these things on their own. Let’s imagine Abraham Lincoln raised the Union Army to sweep through the South and break every chain around a black person’s neck they could find. Let’s imagine JFK and a legion of white Northern liberals were the ones engaging in civil disobedience in the South, leading the March on Washington, and getting beaten in Selma. Let’s imagine Paul LePage, this very day, leads the charge to eradicate every notion of discrimination against black Americans in our criminal justice system, our education system, our culture, and our economy. The ones building monuments in the name of these men, the ones praising their stories in speeches and textbooks, the ones teaching their children about these heroes’ good deeds, and the ones giving thanks should not be black. They should be white. It should be white people who praise them for defeating the egregious system of oppression created by their race as fiercely as they would praise God for healing them of a disease thought incurable. Because as this outrageous abuse of fundamental rights went on, who was in the greatest position to stop it all along?

The most white Americans should ever hope to hear from black Americans—the greatest praise to ever dream of attaining after far more work is done—is “we forgive you.” To ask for anything more is to ignore history and to misunderstand the rights of mankind. For a governor to do so is not only appalling but dangerous. It signifies that he is not only unwilling to participate in the unfinished work of advancing black rights in America without prostration from black people, but that he may be okay with the unraveling of what gains have been made if he feels black people have not demonstrated what he considers to be sufficient gratitude. LePage has significant influence over the lives of the people in his state, particularly in the racially fraught matters of law enforcement and education. And people across the country pay attention to what elected officials say. To many, the words of a governor are more than enough evidence to legitimize a viewpoint. That means his remarks need to be taken very seriously, and they need to be corrected. LePage should issue an apology and reach out to John Lewis and the NAACP at the very least. But the reality is the beliefs he displayed on Tuesday do not represent the kind of thinking that can be easily corrected. The best recourse will likely have to come at the ballot box, both for the governor if he ever decides to run for office again and the colleagues of his that fail to distance themselves from his comments.

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Edited to correct the mistake pointed out by a reader in a comment below. On January 1st, 1863 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the freedom of slaves in rebel (Confederate) territory, not Union territory.

]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2017/01/21/race/paul-lepage-needs-a-lesson-in-humanity-not-just-history/feed/1671Trump won’t bring the paper industry back to Mainehttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/12/06/home/trump-wont-bring-the-paper-industry-back-to-maine/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/12/06/home/trump-wont-bring-the-paper-industry-back-to-maine/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 13:45:24 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=658The BDN Editorial Board sort of beat me to the punch here, but their article makes a similar point in a different way, so I’m still posting my take.

Donald Trump won the election on a false hope. He said and promised many things that brought him the support that delivered him the presidency, but there is one promise in particular that I believe tipped him over the edge. It resonates in places like rural Maine. It resonates because voters have been primed for it after years of politicians selling them the same bill of goods.

“Vote for me, and I’ll bring jobs back.”

We had jobs. Now we don’t. What do we do? Bring them back. Easy!

It wasn’t always so stark. Politicians have made general claims saying they’ll create more jobs forever, and they still do, but the newest fad is to say they’ll bring them “back” from somewhere. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bruce Poliquin, and Emily Cain have all said it, Trump being only the most aggressive. It’s the logical extension of related claims we’ve heard for years during debates over trade deals and jobs programs. Decades were spent arguing over how to keep more jobs from being lost and how to create new ones in their place. But those debates went on too long. In the meantime, factories were shut down, people were laid off, and workers lost their identity. Now people don’t want to hear about how we can create a new economy. They just want their old one back.

But they can’t have it.

Others have done a good job discussing why the methods Trump has proposed for bringing manufacturing jobs back—implementing high tariffs on imports—are unlikely to work. He has floated the imposition of tariffs from anywhere between 20-45%, (Sunday, on Twitter, he said 35%) particularly on China and Mexico, but also across the board. The increase in import costs would be passed on to those buying those products, which is a problem since a huge portion of products sold in this country are imported or are made of imported components. If you’re shopping at Wal-Mart, you’ll be spending 35% more. If you’re a business buying a part for your product, you’ll be spending 35% more. That means consumer spending will go down, business profits will go down, the stock market will go down, and incomes will go down. Of course, the idea is that by making imported products more expensive, it will become profitable to hire people to make the same products in America again. Once they get those jobs, then the economy will be looking golden.

The problem is that those jobs—the key to making the whole idea work—are unlikely to materialize. First, the transition period between the implementation of tariffs and the spinning up of U.S. manufacturing to make up for the expensive imports could set the economy back so far that we are unable to make up what was lost. Second, new factories in the U.S. are likely going to be creating more jobs for robots than people.

There’s a secret about manufacturing in America that few candidates have bothered to acknowledge: we’re making more in this country than we ever have. Manufacturing output (i.e. the amount of stuff we make) has rebounded slightly above the level seen before the Recession, which was the highest on record, and part of that rebound is due to companies moving their operations back from abroad. But—and this is important—manufacturing employment (i.e. the number of Americans working in manufacturing) is almost as low as it’s ever been. That’s because as companies have been moving their factories back here, they have been building production lines that are more automated. We can see the impact in the numbers:

Manufacturing output is in blue; manufacturing employment is in red. Source: FRED Economic Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That’s a major problem for anyone promising to bring back manufacturing jobs. They might be able to bring back the manufacturing, but they won’t be able to bring back the jobs.

With already dim prospects for bringing back factory jobs in general, the outlook is even worse for the paper industry. The market for many paper goods in the age of computerization is what economists would call elastic—if the price goes up, people will buy a lot less of it. If new tariffs mean newspaper and printing and writing paper costs 35% more than it used to, then businesses, schools, and anyone else who buys a lot of paper are going to use less of it. For many businesses running on computers, using paper is more of a luxury than a necessity. That may start being true for schools as well. The switch away from paper may happen faster than Maine paper mills can get back up and running after a tariff hike, negating the incentive for companies to restart their operations here. That means not as many jobs as promised.

What makes the “bring jobs back” pipe dream so frustrating is that it is not as if protectionist trade policies are our last hope. There are real things we could be doing to fix our economy. In August, I wrote about the need to harness the economic power of trade to boost the economy in the places most hurt by the decline in manufacturing jobs. I won’t repeat myself too much here, but I think it is key to give laid off workers far more support than the meager Trade Adjustment Assistance program currently offers and that companies doing well should be incentivized to open new operations in areas hurting the most.

We also need to make jobs in the new economy as good as the old. Currently, that is not the case. The service sector is expanding quickly, but many of the jobs pay less, have fewer benefits, and much less prestige than the factory jobs that have been built up as the cornerstone of the American Dream. I’ll write more about this in another post, since I think it’s an important topic, but remember: manufacturing jobs were the worst of the worst when they first came about, and it was only through decades of political and social agitation by unions that built them into the symbol of good work they have become. We likely need another such movement.

But right now, it’s time for politicians to stop campaigning on the empty promise of “bringing jobs back,” and it’s time for voters to stop believing it. We need people to act on plans to fix the economy that reflect the reality of the 21st century.

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]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/12/06/home/trump-wont-bring-the-paper-industry-back-to-maine/feed/0658Ranked Choice Voting Could Start Renewal of Democracy According to Scholarhttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/17/politics/ranked-choice-voting-could-start-renewal-of-democracy-according-to-scholar/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/17/politics/ranked-choice-voting-could-start-renewal-of-democracy-according-to-scholar/#respondMon, 17 Oct 2016 12:45:51 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=639Larry Diamond is a renowned democracy scholar based at Stanford (and affiliated with my organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, I can happily say). He has made a career out of analyzing democracy in theory and practice all over the world—its grand historical arcs and concepts, as well as its finer details.

So our state should take notice when he calls Question 5 on the Maine ballot this November the “second-most important vote on Nov. 8” in the nation. He recently wrote an op-ed for BDN, which hopefully you all saw already, laying out how he believes the passage of Question 5 could have national implications. But he also recently penned an article for Foreign Policy—not a common venue for Maine political discussion—elaborating why he believes the introduction of ranked choice voting in Maine would have global implications as well. I would highly recommend reading it, but the gist of the article is that democracy around the world has been struggling, and the poor political situation in the U.S. is doing little to boost confidence in the system. Professor Diamond believes ranked choice voting could be a key way to fundamentally improve the state of politics in America, which could begin to serve again as a standard-setter for democratic practice globally and reverse the trend of increasing authoritarianism. And the beginning of that reform could come from Maine this November:

One advantage of the American federal system is that crucial political reforms can take place in one state first and then spread to others if they work. Maine’s vote on Question 5 could trigger a wave of reform momentum in other states. And the resulting reinvigoration of American democracy could once again make the country an example that inspires admiration — and emulation — around the world.

The idea of states as the laboratories of democracy has a chance to be proven true here. Few people are happy with the state of politics in the U.S. today, and many would leap at the chance to change that. But what is given less consideration outside of academic circles is the negative effects the poor state of American democracy has on the rest of the world. More so than any active foreign policy actions by the government, the image of the United States as an enormously successful democracy has had powerful effects on the political direction of other countries. The narrative of democratic triumph over fascism and communism was something felt around the world, as was the economic and cultural strength of the United States, the leading symbol of democracy. This is increasingly being replaced by a narrative of decline in democracies, the U.S. first among them.

I can say from personal experience that people in other countries really do pay attention. I remember clearly when the 2013 government shutdown happened while I was in India, and my Indian host brother, having heard about it on the local news, was utterly baffled and tried to get me to explain to him why it occurred. I could relay the details to him, but it was hard to ignore the fact that it was but one sign of a breaking system. I can only imagine what he thinks of the current election. His attention to American politics was not unique either; everywhere I’ve been, I’ve found that most people keep an eye on events here. As everyone sees what’s happening in other parts of the world, they take those lessons to their own streets and ballot boxes. The U.S. gets the largest share of that attention, and nobody likes what they’re seeing right now.

When it comes time to vote this November, the first consideration about ranked choice voting, as well as the other ballot initiatives, should be what’s best for Maine. What’s the problem that needs solving, and will this help solve it? In this case, I think the answer is that yes, political dysfunction is an issue in Maine as much as anywhere in the country, and this new voting system has a real chance of improving the situation—others have written more about that. But Professor Diamond brings an interesting second consideration into the debate: might this be the best choice for the country? Even the world? It’s hard to imagine one’s voting power in such a way—its implications years or decades down the line—yet it is important to incorporate the full picture of possibilities into one’s decision.

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]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/17/politics/ranked-choice-voting-could-start-renewal-of-democracy-according-to-scholar/feed/0639The Economy Is Improving, But Trump Winning 2nd District Anywayshttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/03/economy/the-economy-is-improving-but-trump-winning-2nd-district-anyways/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/03/economy/the-economy-is-improving-but-trump-winning-2nd-district-anyways/#respondMon, 03 Oct 2016 12:45:39 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=631I recently returned home to Maine for a visit, and I thought I would share a couple of observations from the trip. There were two changes since I was last there a few months ago that surprised me.

The first is how well the economy appears to be doing. New business were open, old businesses had expanded, and help wanted signs were out. The downtown area of my hometown has an unfortunate history of very high turnover for small businesses. So it was a pleasant surprise to see not only that many of the recently opened retail stores are still there, but that two have actually expanded in the last few months. New restaurants in town continue to be busy as well, although some have yet stand the test of a full winter.

On top of the humming businesses, just about everyone I know from my hometown has a job, and many of them have jobs they actually like. Given that I mostly know other people in their 20s, that’s pretty remarkable. These observations are backed up by the fact that Oxford County’s unemployment rate for August was at 4.2%, down from a frightening 10.2% in August 2009, the second highest in the state at the time. Sunny forecasts from these numbers should be hedged by the ever-present labor participation rate problem in Maine, and I have written about the adverse effects of Maine’s aging population before. But there is real good news in the unemployment statistics, and I had a chance to see it first-hand.

The second thing that surprised me was how strong support is for Trump. I wasn’t sure if all the yard signs I was seeing were indicative of nothing more than an aggressive sign-placing campaign on the part of Republicans or an actual indication of lopsided support for the candidate. A Press Herald poll released towards the end of my stay confirmed that it was no trick of the eye—Trump really does have a commanding lead. FiveThirtyEight’s model puts Trump’s chances of winning at over 70%. All the poll data is a few weeks old at this point, and who knows what will happen in the remaining month of the race. But it’s clear Clinton has a lot of ground to gain if she wants to win the district.

On the face of it, there is an interesting dichotomy here, with large margins of voters expressing support for a candidate whose message is essentially “everything is horrible,” despite the fact that things seem to really be improving. It is not too surprising, however, that a district that stayed blue for a long time with the support of union Democrats can flip red when those workers flock to a Republican candidate pledging to blow up free trade, which they see as the cause of their personal ills. The economy might be improving, but it’s not the improvement they want to see. People support Trump for a variety of reasons of course, but I’m guessing the block of swing voters that can deliver him rural Maine are latching on to him at the moment for this reason. There is an economic identity politics here being played in the 2nd District that Trump has tapped into. It’s a topic I’ll likely come back to with a later post, since it will continue to play an important role in Maine’s politics whether Trump wins or loses.

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]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/10/03/economy/the-economy-is-improving-but-trump-winning-2nd-district-anyways/feed/0631Judging by History, a European Ban on Maine Lobster Might Really Happenhttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/09/16/home/judging-by-history-a-european-ban-on-maine-lobster-might-really-happen/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/09/16/home/judging-by-history-a-european-ban-on-maine-lobster-might-really-happen/#respondFri, 16 Sep 2016 12:45:12 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=611Earlier this year, Sweden complained about finding American lobsters in nearby waters and called for a ban on imports of the crustacean. Last week, the EU took a major step forward in the process for pursuing such a ban when a scientific review body said that Sweden’s complaint has merit. That means that a further review will now be conducted on whether the American lobster is a threat to native European lobsters and whether banning its import is a solution. If the wider review says yes to those questions, then the EU may very well halt all imports of American lobster. The U.S. and Canada exports $200 million worth of lobster to EU countries each year, so a ban could be devastating to the lobster industry.

Unfortunately, the EU does have a history of banning or otherwise restricting U.S. food products for various reasons. There have been serious trade disputes over much more common food items, most notably beef and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The EU, by banning the import of meat from cows treated with growth hormones, has effectively banned U.S. beef imports since 1981. The history of this dispute is shockingly long, covering multiple arbitrations, consultations, and appeals, as well as a ruling from the World Trade Organization (WTO). As it currently stands, U.S. beef is still banned for import, and the U.S. still imposes retaliatory tariffs on some EU food products. Complicating the matter, the U.S. had banned beef from the EU for fifteen years because of mad cow disease, but that was lifted in January 2015. The GMO story is possibly even more convoluted, and it has also been the source of a trade dispute between the EU and U.S. for years. Now only specifically approved GMO crops are allowed, but millions of tons of those crops are imported, largely for animal feed. A number of countries have banned GMOs from being grown, and all food in the EU containing more than a certain percentage of GMO ingredients must be labeled as such.

It is important to note that the lobster case is different in a number of ways. The first, of course, is that the lobster market, while large, is far smaller than the beef and GMO market. The second is that the justification for potentially banning lobsters is completely different from those two cases. Whereas the bans on growth hormone beef and GMOs were over perceived health risks, the ban on lobster is proposed because of its potential as an invasive species (which a UMaine scientist, for one, disagrees with). As far as I know, this would mark the first time a food product would be banned for import in the EU for that reason.

However, when it comes to environmental policy in particular, the EU is known to err on the side of banning things. They take a fundamentally different approach to policy, one based on the “precautionary principle,” which essentially means they assume something is bad and must be proven to be good. So if there is any doubt whether or not American lobsters could pose a threat to European lobsters, the government is going to lean towards banning them by default. While the EU technically takes this approach to all regulation, in reality they aren’t much more precautionary than the U.S. on average, only on certain things. But when it comes to food—and particularly the environment—they have no problem banning something.

Of course, the U.S. won’t let American lobster get banned without a fight. Maine’s congressional delegation condemned the recent decision, and earlier they sent a letter to the EU along with other members of Congress from New England protesting Sweden’s complaint. If the EU follows through with a ban, the lawmakers will almost certainly push for the case to go to the WTO.

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]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/09/16/home/judging-by-history-a-european-ban-on-maine-lobster-might-really-happen/feed/0611ISIS Online Recruitment Has Wide Reach and Will Be Tough to Beathttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/30/conflict/isis-online-recruitment-has-wide-reach-and-will-be-tough-to-beat/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/30/conflict/isis-online-recruitment-has-wide-reach-and-will-be-tough-to-beat/#respondTue, 30 Aug 2016 12:45:16 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=542It was recently revealed that a man living in Freeport traveled to the Middle East to fight for ISIS in 2013 and died in Lebanon in 2015. Reports indicate that he was radicalized online. The exact nature of how that radicalization transpired has not been detailed in the press, but based on other cases, it is possible to make an educated guess.

Adnan Fazeli was a man who felt alienated from his community. He had family, but for whatever reason did not adapt well to his new environment in the U.S. after fleeing persecution in Iran. A BDN article on Fazeli pointed to research showing that those prone to radicalization tend to not identify with either the culture they emigrated or are descended from or the one that they came to. It would make sense for this to apply in Fazeli’s case, since he was forced to escape his homeland and had trouble assimilating in the U.S., according to his family. Seeking out ideas different from those around him that he could not connect to, he turned to the internet. Maybe for instructions on religious piety, maybe for explanations of why violent Islamists were carrying out terrorist acts, maybe for a convincing argument of who was the greatest enemy to Iran, Fazeli eventually fell into the hole of online extremist Salafism.* He converted to Sunni Islam from his native Shia branch and began to demonstrate the signs of Salafism’s more devout—and eventually its most extreme—followers. Whether it was a circle of extremists or just one Fazeli grew close to, someone eventually convinced him to join a terrorist group. They likely helped plan his trip to the Middle East and potentially paid for it. All told, it took about four years for the transformation.

It is worth noting that, as far as we know, Fazlei was not radicalized by anyone in the U.S., nor did he radicalize anyone. His family, whether they felt similarly alienated in the U.S. or not, were not radicalized and are in fact the ones who alerted law enforcement about Fazeli. But Fazeli did not radicalize alone. The FBI search warrant affidavit that was the basis of Press Herald and BDN reporting on the issue states that they suspect he was helped. In fact, the point of conducting the warrant, since they knew Fazeli was already dead, was to try to figure out who may have helped him.

It is speculative at this point to say that Fazeli was actively recruited. It is possible that he was motivated enough to radicalize himself based on what he found online and make his own plans for traveling to join a terrorist group. But that is rarely how people work. The most likely scenario is that he was engaged to some degree by recruiters online. It is happening all the time, and it has become a hallmark of ISIS’s strategy.

We frequently hear in vague terms how advanced ISIS is on social media. However, the prominence of their barbaric execution videos can mislead people into thinking their shock value virality is the only reason they are considered so internet savvy. It actually goes far beyond that. For recruitment, these videos are only bait. While their brand of barbaric content can be the impetus for some individuals to join, rarely is it as simple as some disturbed person seeing such a video and thinking “Awesome, I want to do that,” and hopping on a plane. More often, if an act of violence perpetrated by ISIS is an impetus for an individual’s recruitment at all, it is because they may see one of the group’s videos, and whether disturbed or intrigued, they seek out more information about them. When this happens on Twitter, as it often does, any curious individual will be quickly met by smooth-talking users who support ISIS. Many are experts at manipulating vulnerable people. They initially play down whatever aspects of the group someone is horrified by, say the media/government is painting an unfair picture of the group, and spin tales of a paradise in ISIS’s territory. We hear about execution videos all the time, but rarely do we hear about the videos ISIS produces that show their territory as a utopia. These recruiters make the same positive pitch for ISIS’s violent jihadist Salafi religious ideology as well, converting both Muslims and non-Muslims alike to the extreme sect.

Conversion to supporting ISIS requires more than just a good pitch though. Their operatives may be very good at what they do, but their methods will only ever work on individuals who are susceptible to it. And that does not just mean bona fide psycho- or sociopaths. People who feel isolated, socially outcast, or mistreated, combined with a lack of rational decision-making capacity, can be vulnerable to radicalization given precisely the wrong circumstances. Obviously these emotions have to be fairly extreme and sustained, but they are not unimaginable or totally alien to regular society.

Last year the New York Times ran a piece that gave excellent insight into the process. They interviewed a girl living with her grandparents in rural Washington who was very nearly convinced to travel to first Austria and eventually ISIS territory solely because the ISIS supporters she met online were so friendly. The girl had persistent poor judgement and was emotionally immature according to her therapist, but the way recruiters were able to take advantage of that initially only through Twitter is staggering. It is worth reading the full article or at least watching the video, but this quote says a lot:

James Foley, a journalist she had never heard of, had been beheaded by ISIS, a group she knew nothing about. The searing image of the young man kneeling as the knife was lifted to his throat stayed with her.

Riveted by the killing, and struck by a horrified curiosity, she logged on to Twitter to see if she could learn more.

“I was looking for people who agreed with what they were doing, so that I could understand why they were doing it,” she said. “It was actually really easy to find them.”

She found herself shocked again, this time by the fact that people who openly identified as belonging to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, took the time to politely answer her questions.

“Once they saw that I was sincere in my curiosity, they were very kind,” she said. “They asked questions about my family, about where I was from, about what I wanted to do in life.”

There is no hard data on how many people have been radicalized entirely through social media interaction, but from what we know, the girl in Washington is not the only one. In 2014 three teenage girls from Denver suburbs tried to join ISIS after engaging with ISIS supporters online, actually leaving for Syria before being stopped at the Frankfurt airport. In 2015 an Arizona man was charged with helping ISIS after he successfully encouraged another man online to travel to join ISIS. The shooter in Orlando also seems to have informed his acts and beliefs from online materials, but it’s not clear that he was actively recruited by ISIS supporters. Many, possibly most, are radicalized through some combination of online and in-person interaction, but the presence of cells, let alone communities, of individuals supporting radicalization face-to-face is extremely small in the U.S., particularly compared to other parts of the world.

It is estimated that 250 Americans have tried to join ISIS, but most never made it, meaning Fazeli is one of the few. As of August 3rd, 100 individuals have been charged with ISIS-related offenses. The George Washington University report ISIS in Americaoffers the best look at these individuals, as well as U.S.-based ISIS supporters on Twitter and those who successfully traveled to Syria. Of those arrested, 88% are male, more than half are between 18 and 26, and approximately 36% are converts to Islam. The report hammers home the idea that the motivations and circumstances of each individual are very different and complex. However, drawing on a quote from the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, it says that those Americans drawn to ISIS tend to be “disenfranchised individuals seeking ideological, religious, and personal fulfillment.” These are individuals that may be drawn to other extremist views just as easily, which the internet is always happy to oblige (Dylan Roof, who killed nine African-Americans in Charleston last year, self-radicalized online, for example). But due to some combination of factors, their search for fulfillment drives them towards ISIS.

While social media is not the only means through which ISIS supporters can radicalize or recruit people in the U.S., it is particularly nefarious for a couple of reasons. The first is that due to the anonymity of many social media accounts, stopping the individuals behind them is always going to be difficult. The second is that radicalization can be conducted far beyond wherever a recruiter may happen to live, as was the case with the girl in rural Washington being recruited by a man in the U.K. When someone is radicalized in person by someone else, that drastically increases the likelihood of both parties being caught by law enforcement. Law enforcement has plenty of experience dealing with criminal enterprises that operate based on in-person interaction, but that’s not so with illicit online networks. While agencies have been developing tools and methods to deal with these problems, they keep evolving. For example, although they both rely heavily on it, ISIS uses the internet very differently than al Qaeda did. Al Qaeda used it largely for covert communication, trading information on forums and letting potential recruits find their way to them, with only the occasional media blast of a video of Osama bin Laden or training camp. ISIS, on the other hand, has embraced constant and overt publicity, operating through thousands of Twitter accounts, posting endless videos, infographics, and articles showcasing all aspects of their “caliphate”, and trying to not only remain in the public eye, but actively reaching out to individuals to get them to join their cause. That requires a different response from those trying to stop the group.

The social media companies themselves play a crucial role. Twitter has been the medium of choice for extremist recruiters, and the company, after undergoing criticism for some time, has begun deleting accounts en masse. On August 18th, they announced that they had suspended a total of 360,000 accounts since mid-2015 for “violent threats and the promotion of terrorism.” This has definitely made a dent, but they still have a long way to go. The pace of account banning has increased quite a bit in recent months, yet the company is still largely reliant on identifying offending accounts through brute force—users flag extremist content, and a team at Twitter reviews it and decides whether to ban the account—although according to their statement, they have begun to employ adjusted spam-blocking software to assist the team. The problem is that users who get banned can just make another account. When they do so, there are “shout-out” accounts that let the ISIS Twitterverse know that the banned user is back online, and they can rebuild their following more quickly.

One nonprofit group, the Counter Extremism Project, has been working with a Dartmouth researcher to adapt a methodology already used to automatically prevent the sharing of child pornography to block the sharing of extremist content. If the system could be implemented as well as the original anti-child pornography version has been, it could sharply reduce the prevalence of ISIS supporters on Twitter and elsewhere. The U.S. government has its own small program to counter ISIS on social media, the Global Engagement Center, which has started supporting other institutions and social media users that can provide targeted opposition to extremists (at least that’s the idea, but they’re relatively new). The Pentagon is also looking for new ways to deal with the problem of radicalized lone-wolf attackers specifically. On the law enforcement side, the FBI has made use of social media to launch sting operations against individuals who were willing to facilitate a terror attack in some manner (although the nature of these stings, and whether some are really cases of entrapment, is debated). An otherwise rare tactic, these undercover operations have been in used in 55% of prosecutions of suspected ISIS supporters.

Making the country safer from terrorists radicalized online will likely require an escalation of all of these approaches. More accounts banned, more content blocked, more counter-narratives promoted, better technology developed, and inevitably, more arrests. While things like blocking Twitter accounts may seem trivial in the face of horrific terrorist attacks, online recruitment is the cornerstone of ISIS’s strategy to launch and inspire terrorist attacks in the U.S., so stopping them in that domain is imperative.

However, the personal dimension to radicalization—the alienation and disenfranchisement so common in extremists—is something that governments and companies will never be able to address on their own. That is where the actions of families, friends, and communities become pivotal in pulling potential extremists back from the fringe. For Adnan Fazeli, it is possible that if someone had intervened earlier, they could have stopped the process of alienation and radicalization. Being able to identify the warning signs and learning how to bring someone back into the fold is a vital skill that few likely possess. Developing these abilities in more people will be equally as important to beating extremism in the long run as reversing the prevalence of terrorist supporters on the internet will be in the short run.

*Salafism is basically a fundamentalist sect of Islam. The word is frequently used interchangeably with Wahhabism, which is a revivalist form of Salafism based in Saudi Arabia. It isn’t inherently violent, and there are various actively nonviolent and apolitical strains of Salaifsm, but it is also the foundation of most current Islamist terrorist groups’ ideologies, namely al Qaeda and ISIS.

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]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/30/conflict/isis-online-recruitment-has-wide-reach-and-will-be-tough-to-beat/feed/0542How to Fix Tradehttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/08/home/how-to-fix-trade/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/08/home/how-to-fix-trade/#respondMon, 08 Aug 2016 12:45:13 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=516One of the key issues underlying the political currents driving the election this year is free trade. The candidates frequently discuss the topic itself, but trade is also an indirect cause or contributor to the broader sentiments defining each political side. On the right you have supporters of Donald Trump looking warily at the rest of the world, suspicious of those who have gained as they perceive America to have declined. On the left you have supporters of Bernie Sanders, now largely in Hillary Clinton’s fold, looking warily at the rich, again suspicious of individuals who have gained as they perceive others to have declined. The ties of free trade to these issues is clear. The makeup of the American economy has changed drastically with the opening of our markets to the rest of the world, leading countless jobs to be exported abroad and the companies—and the owners of those companies—who exported those jobs to profit greatly. American society has also reaped many benefits from this, but the gains of free trade have always been much harder to pinpoint than the drawbacks.

Unfortunately, the top-line policies from Trump, Clinton, and Sanders aren’t real solutions to the trade problem. As I’ve said before, simply not signing the TPP won’t solve anything. Throwing up huge tariffs on China isn’t a real solution either. Look around your house and find the products you have that are made at least partly in China (not to mention all the other countries). If imports from China become more expensive, you won’t start getting all of those products now with a “Made in America” tag. Instead, most will just become too expensive to afford, and U.S. manufacturing will only be able to pick up some of the slack. The ability for electronics companies to source cheap components from all over the world is the only reason you’re able to read this on a computer and smartphone that don’t cost as much as your car.

Any real solution needs to be targeted at the actual problem: the displacement of workers. When something can be bought more cheaply from another country, the people who were making it in this country are going to be out of a job. The federal government has a program that’s supposed to address this, but it is small. The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program had 47,335 participants in 2015. Between 2001 and 2015, the Department of Labor estimates that TAA covered 2.1 million workers (and that is almost definitely an overestimate, judging by more specific yearly reports). Meanwhile, over that same time period, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that 3.4 million U.S. jobs were displaced due to trade with China. That’s a big gap to start with, but moreover, the benefits those 2.1 million received are not all life-changing. The benefits are a good start, but they are limited. Displaced workers can get either:

Up to $1,250 for job searching and relocation

Cash allowances on top of unemployment insurance, which is extended if enrolled in a training program

Up to two years of job training in an approved program

Two years of wage supplements for half of the salary difference if the worker takes a new job that pays less than the job they lost

All nice things, but all time-limited and subject to restraints. More importantly, the program is unlikely to do much to heal a local economy in the wake of a closed company or factory, since it helps workers find employment but doesn’t directly help create new employment opportunities. There is a side of TAA that is targeted at businesses, but it is even smaller. The budget request for the program’s next fiscal year is $10 million, which is clearly not enough to turn around all the businesses in the U.S. affected by import competition.

So what should we do instead? No plan looks perfect, and no one policy will solve everything. But here are some ideas I want to put out there:

1. Grants, loans, and advice to displaced workers for starting small businesses. Helping small businesses get off the ground is something worth doing in any case, and doubly so for those losing their jobs. This would not only help the workers in the event of a factory closure, but also help keep the local economy going. Maintaining a small businesses is very hard, which is why the vast majority close in under two years, and the support shouldn’t be so excessive as to incentivize bad ideas. There may also have to be some micromanagement so that when a plant closes down, 200 people don’t all try to open up a diner in town. But on the whole, this would allow the market to do its thing. It would give a community a diversity of businesses to rely on, so the whole town doesn’t go under if one closes.

2. Incentives for companies, particularly those benefiting from free trade, to open new operations in areas most affected by outsourcing. As many workers struggle with job losses, plenty of companies are doing very well and are continuing to grow. Naturally this growth tends to disproportionately benefit large cities where these companies are already based, and more rural areas don’t see much of the action. With strong enough financial incentives, companies could be convinced to disperse their operations as they grow, especially now that teleworking is becoming more feasible in a wider range of industries. It could mean either hiring a few people to work remotely from a small town, or actually opening up a new office in a small city struggling with factory closures. This could also be paired with funding for training for the specific job openings.

3. Funding for two- and four-year degrees at public schools, not just up to two years of job training. This would look like the current TAA program for job training, except not as restricted. If a displaced worker can set themselves up on a new career path, particularly one that will let them escape the need of government help in the future, they should be allowed to by all means. College may not be for everyone, but graduates certainly do make more money on average.

4. For workers past a certain age, wage supplements until they retire. If you’re 58 and the factory you’ve worked at your whole life shuts down, you don’t want to have to figure out a whole new career path. Here is where I think wage supplements could be put to use. Then the worker won’t have to push back retirement by a number of years if they can’t save up enough because they got stuck with a lower-paying job.

Of course, figuring out where to find money is harder than thinking of how to spend it. These ideas would certainly come at a cost, and that money would have to come from somewhere. In principle, the funds could be drawn from the winners of free trade:

1. Investment tax on companies proportional to how much of their business is imports, particularly of products whose production they outsourced. The stock market and all that’s linked to it is where much of the gains of outsourcing have ended up. Figuring out a way to redirect some of that wealth to the people who have lost their jobs as a result of production moving overseas may be the most fair thing to do, as Sanders-esque as it may be. Of course, while the idea sounds relatively simple, taxes never are, particularly on investments. Figuring out how much of a company’s business has been moved overseas would certainly be a controversial and difficult process.

2. Tax on corporate profits that go unused for too long. By taxing profits that aren’t being reinvested, this tax could both raise revenue and encourage businesses to invest. Again, this could be proportional to how much a company imports. U.S. corporations are sitting on $1.6 trillion in cash. That’s a big pile of money that could be utilized, but 72% is held overseas, so is untouchable by our current tax system. Still, a small tax on the rest could have a strong effect. Even better would be to make this part of a larger reform of our corporate income tax to incentivize companies to bring more of that money back to the U.S., but that’s another topic.

The devil is always in the details with policy, and there are almost certainly some big devils hiding in the details here. But on the face of it, I think there’s a real chance policies along these lines would have a positive impact.

Heading further into the 21st century, we don’t have the option of propagating trade policies that are either excessively backward-looking or uncaring for average workers. Halting growth in global trade would hobble major market forces that offer real economic benefits, but letting it continue without compensation will only put more people out of work. And that will only fuel the kind of social and political anger this year has laid bare. Lawmakers need to start making laws that will channel the strength of free trade into building up the communities that it can break.

Like any of these ideas? Hate any of them? Have any proposals of your own? Let me know in the comments below or on the Maine Meets World Facebook page.

]]>http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/08/08/home/how-to-fix-trade/feed/0516Maine’s Peacemakerhttp://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/07/16/conflict/maines-peacemaker/
http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/2016/07/16/conflict/maines-peacemaker/#respondSat, 16 Jul 2016 14:00:10 +0000http://mainemeetsworld.bangordailynews.com/?p=504These days it can be hard to remember that violent conflicts can actually end. Modern wars seem to rise and fall instead of start and finish. As violence has turned inward over the past few decades, shifting from between nations to within nations, conflict driven by sectarianism has gained the spotlight. Such conflicts can seem intractable given their foundation in typically decades- or centuries-old grievances. But this has not stopped the international community from trying everything they can think of to end ongoing violence. In these attempts to find political solutions, there is always a seemingly endless string of failed negotiations and broken agreements.

But against all odds, sometimes peace does prevail. The people get weary of war, leaders soften their stances, and deals can be struck. Inevitably at the heart of these historic deals are individuals devoted to making peace a reality. Maine has just one of those such individuals—one who has seen both success and failure in the peacemaking process.

Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell was appointed the first U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland by Bill Clinton in 1995. By that point “The Troubles” had been going on for nearly thirty years. A guerrilla war was being fought between Irish nationalists, a.k.a. republicans, who wanted Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland and Unionists, a.k.a. loyalists, who wanted it to stay in the United Kingdom. The Unionists were largely Protestants descended from British settlers while the republicans were Catholic and ethnically native Irish. The Irish had a long history of trouble with the British, but the capital-T Troubles started in the late 1960s as a republican civil rights campaign devolved into violence from all sides. By 1970-72 the violence had escalated dramatically with hundreds killed and thousands injured in bombings, shootings, and street battles. The violence tapered off somewhat towards the end of the decade, but continued through the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Little had been resolved.

The appointment of George Mitchell signaled that Clinton was serious about ending the conflict. Mitchell had been one of the most respected senators in Congress as the Senate Majority Leader and had been considered as a Vice Presidential candidate for Clinton. That the conflict was of interest to the U.S. is no surprise given our large Irish population. Mitchell himself could claim Irish descent since his father was an orphan born to Irish immigrants. The U.K. government initially had no interest in letting the U.S. get involved in the peace process after Clinton let Gerry Adams, the head of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) political wing, Sinn Fein, visit the U.S. in 1994, since they saw it as both giving him validity and allowing him to fundraise for the IRA. But after the IRA declared a ceasefire, potentially due to the U.S. visit, and Clinton and Mitchell visited Northern Ireland in 1995, reaching out to both sides and condemning the violence, the British government changed their minds. Mitchell was officially appointed the chair of the peace talks, which began in earnest in 1996. The parties agreed to the “Mitchell Principles” laid out in the beginning of the year, which required a commitment to disarmament and peaceful political negotiation in order to participate.

Negotiations took two years. During that time, Mitchell gained the respect of both sides, including the Unionists initially untrusting of American involvement. His greatest tool was one that seems to be wielded far too little in politics: listening.

“Mr. Mitchell’s great skill was that he learned to embrace silence. He sat at his table, listening to speech after speech…He pitched himself against the tenacity of the fanatics. He was unpaid and initially unheralded, but he fell in love with the people and allowed them to talk through their vitriol. He tried never to take sides — he split a feather down the middle and encouraged both halves to take flight.”

By the time his commission finished crafting a final agreement in 1998, enough trust was built into the process for the key parties to sign. The Good Friday Agreement covered the multiple factions within Northern Ireland, as well as the relationship between Ireland and Britain. It contained a litany of measures, including creating new political institutions in Northern Ireland, handling civil rights for the Irish Catholic minority, and paramilitary disarmament. The agreement marked the beginning of the end of armed conflict there. Despite its provisions being implemented in fits and starts, disagreements, even severe ones, have been handled peacefully. The peace is not taken for granted, and when troubles arise, as they have in the wake of the Brexit vote, people are quick to reaffirm the importance of non-violence (Northern Ireland voted against leaving the E.U., but the U.K. as a whole voted to leave, leading republicans to call for a referendum on leaving the U.K. and joining Ireland).

Mitchell’s role as Special Envoy for Northern Ireland ended along with Bill Clinton’s presidency in January 2001. Eight years later, he would be appointed to a similar position, but one that proved more vexing. Two days after President Obama’s inauguration, he appointed Mitchell to be the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, a role focused on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mitchell had proven his ability to coax intransigent combatants in Ireland to come to peace, but he was now trying to deal with something on another level. Armed conflict had been happening on and off since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, ranging from civilian-on-civilian violence to full-blown interstate war. The fate of Israel and Palestine had long held global geopolitical, religious, and cultural weight far beyond the region’s small size (in total it is less than a third the size of Maine).

When Mitchell was appointed to the position, there was a lot resting on his shoulders. President Obama made finding a resolution to the conflict a primary goal of his from the beginning of his first term. After 19 months of no discussions, indirect talks resumed between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in May 2009 with Mitchell as their conduit. A meeting between Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took place in September. In November, Netanyahu declared a freeze on new Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which was a key step for beginning peace negotiations in earnest. But the freeze did not include East Jerusalem, so the Palestinians took it as an empty gesture and refused to offer anything in return, angering the Israelis.

Indirect talks continued off and on, and the process lagged for the next ten months as all sides maneuvered. But direct talks between the leaders finally began in September of 2010. That month, as talks were ongoing, Obama made a speech to the UN aspiring to achieve a solution within a year. The talks would end unsuccessfully after only three weeks. Israel’s settlement freeze was due to expire on September 26th, and despite pressure to extend the freeze to allow talks to continue, they let it lapse and the negotiations ended. The peace process would not recover under Mitchell’s tenure. He resigned eight months later, on May 13th, 2011, having served for the two years he originally intended.

So what went wrong? Mitchell’s role in the initial progress and ultimate failure is difficult to parse out, but the best insight we have into his involvement as well as the overall maneuvering of the White House in the process comes from a 2012 article in the Washington Post. The details of Mitchell’s role are best read in the article, but the overall arc of the story is worth pulling out. He was clearly a key facilitator in all of the major steps in the process—the indirect talks, the settlement freeze, and eventually the direct talks—and behind him he had the weight of Obama’s own speeches and meetings with the leaders in question. Mitchell had a bold vision for how the U.S. could position itself and what they should pressure the two sides, particularly Israel, to agree to as a baseline for the talks. The settlement freeze was one such thing, and he also wanted Obama to address a division of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel—two of the thorniest issues.

Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton, and George Mitchell meeting at the State Department.

This is where he started to run into internal White House politics. Obama had tapped Dennis Ross, a veteran of Middle East policy, to help handle the peace process. Ross had a very different idea about how the U.S. should approach the issue; he didn’t like the settlement freeze idea, or Mitchell’s boldness on other negotiating points. Early on the political environment seemed favorable for real movement towards peace given Obama’s initial popularity in the Arab world, the backing of Jewish lawmakers in the U.S., and Netanyahu’s apparent belief that it would be personally politically damaging if he was to run afoul of a U.S. president. Therefore, Mitchell’s vision was embraced by Obama and his administration. But all of those things soon changed. Netanyahu hardened as he discovered he could buck Obama and do even better domestically, Obama lost political capital at home as Congressional Democrats didn’t want him to upset key Jewish groups in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, and his sway with the Arab world was quickly declining (and would become nearly irrelevant once the Arab Spring began in early 2011). As this happened, Ross and his narrower sights became favored at Mitchell’s expense. There is speculation that Mitchell resigned because of these disagreements, but he denies it.

The failure of the Israel-Palestine peace process cannot be blamed on Mitchell (or Ross) any more than the success of the Northern Ireland one can be. Ultimately it is the warring parties that need to decide to end their fight, and someone like Mitchell is only there to nudge them along. In Northern Ireland, Mitchell seemingly had the benefit of greater autonomy and was able to put his skill of listening into action. He had no such luck in the Middle East with so many powerful actors, including the President, having their hands in the mix. Still, for his great success in Northern Ireland and hard-won progress in Israel-Palestine, even if it was short-lived, Mitchell proved himself as a remarkable peacemaker and a truly notable public servant from Maine.

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